Even though leftist economists such as Paul Krugman and Larry Summers have admitted that unemployment insurance benefits are a recipe for more joblessness, the White House is arguing that Congress should enact legislation to further subsidize unemployment.
It’s understandable that the Obama Administration is concerned about the issue. These four charts show that the labor market is in terrible shape.
But how can we convince the President that more government is just making a bad situation even worse? What will it take to educate him about the need to reduce government-imposed barriers to job creation?
Perhaps this cartoon will do the trick
And if statists learn from this cartoon, then maybe we should show them another cartoon showing the link between unemployment insurance benefits and joblessness.
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1. This is a subject which I plan to address in an upcoming article on my blog. I have tentatively entitled it, “Why All Politicians are Liars.”
2. While a direct cause and effect relationship can be relatively easily proven in the physical universe involving physical / inanimate objects, it is far more difficult to prove such a relationship in the human / emotional universe. In the realm of human / emotional concepts, of which “job creation” and “job pursuits” are subsets, we distance ourselves even further from potential solutions, and complicate the search, when we politicize the discussion.
3. The history of technology, believe it or not, is a relatively recent concept. In fact, a professor at Georgia Tech during the 1970s and 1980s, Melvin Kranzberg, Ph.D., was known as the “Father of the History of Technology.” It is a subject taught in the “social science” arena, not the hard core science arena.
4. By now, you have a hint as to where I am going. Job creation is about technology. Technology is about creativity, innovation, and invention. I was in the technology, innovation, and intellectual property field for years. The inventors with whom I and my firm dealt did not stop to think one minute about any of the factors mentioned above. They innovated and invented because that’s who they are and that’s what drives them spiritually and emotionally, sometimes to the exclusion of other things that drive other folks.
5. When you have a society where a sufficient number, or CRITICAL MASS, of your citizens are inventors, scientists, and engineers, new technologies result. New technologies create new businesses, and new businesses create jobs. Check out the numbers of scientists and engineers being produced by our universities as compared to past years. As a result of my experience in the tech start-up venture capital world, I will concede that fledging businesses or even struggling businesses might consider some of the factors mentioned. However, most good, profitable businesses have savvy people at their helm who figure out the way to make more money, no matter what the environment in which they find themselves. They also work 80-90 hours per week, not 40. They are not of the mindset that they let the factors mentioned above influence their pursuit of profit.
6. Technology waves occur in cycles.
7. Folks in the technology arena claim that “what the world needs now” is another earth-shattering, significant invention which advances the interests of all humankind, no matter the socio-economic status or geographic location: things along the order of the automobile, the airplane, the locomotive, the computer, the personal computer, the Internet. We have not had such a type of invention in a very long time. We are due. In the mean time, the world struggles.
8. American society has become a society obsessed with sound-bites, the superficial, athletes, entertainers, and media talking heads. Some months ago, I wrote a piece entitled, “Does Any One Have a Real Job in America Any More.” In our transition from a manufacturing economy to a service economy, the product (i.e. inventions and technology) production got shifted off shore for profit reasons (which some deem treasonous), and we were left with ad men, salespeople, fast food dispensers, and folks to collect your money.
9. Bottom line: we need more scientists, engineers and inventors to start the process of creating jobs.
10. The cover story on Newsweek some weeks ago discussed how we are killing ourselves from a scientific perspective, and recounted some of our earlier successes. The Chinese are producing kids eager to pursue scientific and engineering careers (in massive numbers). We’re about to get our butts kicked by the sheer numbers alone, unless we wake up and stop the partisan bickering over non-issues.
The poor only make jobs for government “workers”. which is why the government is “investing” so heavily in the poor. Poverty as a stock has got nowhere to go but up.
But Mr, Mitchell and “drrik” haven’t you heard? It is actually the unemployed who create jobs now…..
The Pradox of Thrift is Now the Paradox of Working:
http://wp.me/p13BZa-44
Simple economic “law”. If you want more of something (like unemployment), subsidize it. It you want less (like productivity and jobs), tax it.
The lib/progs and RINOs persist with the idea that since they control the government, they can just repeal that law.
Problem is that particular economic law is just an observation of normal human nature. The lib/prog’s program will work fine. They just need to get a better quality normal human. And the poor quality humans that they are currently having to deal with will be handled appropriately with the usual methods of increasing regulations, fines, interrogations, and incarcerations.